The high price of beauty

The money some women spend each month (or week) on beauty treatments could fund a trip to Oahu, Hawaii, where you can forgo the blowout and do yoga on the beach.

Every woman has a perceived body issue or part they’re obsessed with, and will go to great pains to camouflage, pluck, dye or even eradicate. It might be keeping up a certain hair color, getting body hair ripped off or regular facials. Increasingly, these procedures have migrated from doctors’ offices or dermatologists to spas and nail salons (caveat emptor, ladies), and are billed as absolutely essential to one’s psychological well being — as in, “You don’t wax? Why not?” Or “You cut your own hair?”

But leave it to the New York Times (registration required) Style section to find the most extreme beauty-aholics who spend hundreds of dollars weekly getting everything from blowouts and obsessive manicures to Botox (of course), lipo and, inevitably, plastic surgery. Think we’re kidding? Check out Carmen Electra lookalike Ginger Grace’s weekly tab:

It’s easy to dismiss this hooked-on-beauty story as just another shallow, image-obsessed L.A./Miami/NYC phenomenon — we have! — yet we’re betting there are plenty of San Francisco women on equally intimate terms with these services. How does one rationalize the obscene time and money spent? Well, says Ms. Grace, “I want to look healthy and feel good about myself. I want to look refreshed, but not in an exaggerated way.”

So do we, Ginger. But every-other-day blowouts and twice-a-week eyebrow waxing? Fake lashes? To sell real estate? We won’t even get into some of the even more outlandish practices mentioned in the piece(hint: hyperbaric chamber, hiking coach!).

It’s a triumph of the beauty industry that women everywhere are now convinced that beauty requires these expensive measures, rather than just eating well, wearing sunblock and exercising.

We thought for sure that Jezebel would be all over this story, but apparently another Styles section about men’s fashion was deemed either more outrageous and/or blogworthy. Unless they’re doing some even more serious number-crunching.

Actually, we’ve been a (paid) spy in the houses of beauty before, covertly trying various treatments to write about for publications that care deeply about where celebrities are getting spray tans. Our usual conclusion about these places: Nice, but rarely essential to enjoying life. Except for a pedicures for open-toe devotees during summer. We’re not budging on that one.